The End of the World
by Mindy35
Summary: After Noah is abducted by a disciple of William Lewis', Olivia suffers a brain injury and psychotic break. Her friends work to locate Elliot in an effort to bring her back to reality.
1. Chapter 1

Rating: T, adult themes, some language and implied violence

Warning: Character death

Disclaimer: Not mine, Dick Wolf's and those folks at NBC etc. Lyrics are by Kate Miller-Heidke

Spoilers: for season 15 & 16

Pairing(s): Elliot/Olivia. Some Olivia/Nick and minor Olivia/Alex undertones.

Summary: This story will work so much better if you have no idea what's going on. So for now I'm just gonna say this and see if people read – Olivia. Elliot. Noah. William Lewis. Go.

A/N: I don't know why I did this and I apologise in advance. I was feeling dark.

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><p><em>It's the last day on earth<br>In my dreams, in my dreams  
>It's the end of the world<br>And you've come back to me…_

**i. **

…_nearly lost both mother and son_…

The doctor's voice is low but not low enough that she doesn't hear.

His _nearly_ bodes well.

Must mean she did her job. She's hazy on a lot of things but she's clear on that, at least. Her job is to serve and protect victims. Occasionally these victims are men. More often they're women, children. In this case, a mother and son.

Olivia keeps her eyes closed, not yet betraying the fact that she is floating close to consciousness. She wants to gather a few more clues on the case, on the mother and son and their status, on what exactly put her in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose and going into her wrist. And with a massive, relentless throb where her brain should be.

The doctor standing on the threshold explains in a hushed, official tone that it wasn't the bullet that took her out. It scored her chest, lodging itself in the middle of her vest. Explains the pain beneath her breasts. Apparently she fell back on impact, cracking her head on the concrete and creating a bunch of words she's way too foggy to comprehend. They're probably words she's heard before but she can't remember them or what they mean. She can't even remember the case she was working, the names or the faces of the mother and child she was protecting.

She vaguely remembers plummeting to the floor. Then…just…nope.

Nothing.

A different voice says it's all the doing of one William Lewis. Or William Lucas. Lucas Williams? Or…Louis Williams? The name sounds slightly familiar but maybe it's just one of those generic names that sounds familiar when it actually isn't. Lewis is dead though – or so the voices say – and that confuses her. Because how…? The different voice, the one she recognizes as having the cadence of a cop, says it was his final revenge, perpetrated from beyond the grave. Lewis and his disciple had plenty of time to concoct a revenge plot while behind bars. Once released from prison, the disciple identified his mark, surveilled her while, figured out a close enough target— and that confuses her too. Surely the mother _was_ the target…? Unless the disciple was enlisted to take out someone close to her…? Makes some sense.

He obviously hadn't succeeded though because they'd _nearly_ lost both mother and son.

Nearly.

She's hanging on to that _nearly_.

Confident that she's gathered enough details to feign a basic understanding of what's going on, Olivia lets her eyes crack open. She's got a few niggling queries but she will drop them into the conversation at a later, seemingly casual point. Three men step somberly closer as she surfaces. A man in a white coat gives her an update on her condition but she's not really listening. She looks at the two men with badges – one of them tall, lanky and blond, the other shorter, solid and black.

"How're the mother and son?" she asks them, voice barely above a rasp.

They exchange a look and don't answer. The doctor ushers them out, saying she needs her rest. Olivia tries to lift her head from the pillow, tries to call the cops back. What she really needs is answers. And she won't be able to rest until she gets some.

Next time she opens her eyes, Elliot is there. Only he's younger. And he has way more hair than she remembers. And when she says his name, he replies that his name is Nick. Not Elliot. Nick. She frowns at him but skates right past this. She has questions she needs answered and Elliot will tell her. He's her partner. He has to tell her. Near brutal honesty is one of the greatest assets of their partnership.

When she asks again about the mother and son, Elliot hesitates before telling her, "The mother is recovering."

She presses him for details about the son but Elliot just tells her not to worry. He says everything's being taken care of. When she starts to say _but_ he just smiles his smile and asks if she trusts him or not. She doesn't have to answer. He already knows the answer to that question.

Elliot sleeps by her bed that night, his jacket covering his bunched up body. She wakes once, telling him in the dark to go home to Kathy. Elliot shifts in his seat, answering after a moment:

"You mean Maria?"

Olivia lets the tube in her vein take her away from his question, from his voice, from the familiar blue eyes she can't see. She got one question answered at least – the mother is okay. Well…recovering. Odds are then, so is her son.

Next time she wakes, Elliot has long blonde hair and a slight Southern drawl. He brings her a hairbrush, some pyjamas and underwear from home. Slippers. A book. Her favorite tea. And a few photographs. A nurse immediately confiscates the photographs with a stern _not yet_. Elliot just smiles and asks how she's feeling.

No one asks how much she remembers. Except when they bring in a shrink. Clearly she still has her wits because she can recognize a head-shrinker a mile off. The first one gets nowhere with her. Olivia talks in circles and relishes it, playing games with the woman just to prove her competence. She's still got all her interrogation wiles, she remembers all the techniques she's gathered over the years.

The female shrink gives up and calls in another shrink. This one says they've met before, that they've had many productive sessions together, that they know each other from before. Before she can ask _before what?,_ he tells her that he was the one who gave her the necklace she now wears.

Olivia fingers the necklace around her neck then asks why no one will tell her what happened to the little boy who was part of her case. The shrink doesn't answer her either. Instead, he asks if the name William Lewis means anything to her.

"Yes, he did it," she says, "he's responsible."

"He did what?"

"He's guilty," she adds, certain she's right.

"He's dead," her shrink says.

"I know," she retorts impatiently, "I killed him."

"You killed him?"

"I had to," she insists, "to save the mother and son. So if you're here for my badge—"

"I'm not here for your badge, Olivia."

She leans back in her bed.

The shrink pulls an A4 glossy photo from a file then sits on the edge of her bed. He takes a breath before handing it across to her. The kid is only a toddler with thin, straight, dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Chubby, ruddy cheeks. And a blue giraffe on his striped shirt.

"Is this him?" she asks.

"You don't remember?"

"No. I do. He just…he looks a lot younger here." She hands the photo back. "So how's he doing? I heard they nearly lost him."

Her shrink smiles, tucks the photo back in the file then rises. Before leaving, he tells her he'll come back and check on her in a few days.

The next time Elliot appears, he has grown bald and fat and she can't help laughing out loud. It's pretty funny, after all those years of ritualistic gym attendance, to see him turn into a greying old man. She stops laughing when she sees his eyes well with tears. Olivia apologizes and the shocked tears subside. He sits in the chair by her bed and talks about old times – drinks at McGinty's and Detective So-and-so whose face she can't quite place.

Every so often he looks up at her and asks, "Remember?"

He's acting like her grandpa or something and it's just kind of funny. He tells her to call him Don and that's even funnier. So she laughs and laughs and laughs. She laughs so hard that her chest aches for breath and her eyes start to water. She laughs so long that they escort Old Man Elliot out and stick a needle in her arm.

After that, nothing is funny.

Nothing is anything.

Everything is nothing.

It's dark when she re-surfaces and for a second she panics, not knowing where she is. Her steadily pulsing brain reminds her. She's gotten used to it, the constant beat, a comfortable level of agony. She lifts a hand, lets two fingers timidly trace the folds of bandage that securely strangle her skull.

The blonde Elliot comes back and brushes her hair. They watch infomercials together. People chopping fruit and vacuuming swatches of carpet. But he gets to leave when her cell phone rings. Olivia watches him stride to the door and shut it behind her. Then she switches off the TV.

The young Elliot with the thick head of hair and a perpetual five o'clock shadow sleeps by her bed each night. She tells him to go home but he ignores her. Like always. He doesn't say much. Like always. He just comes, sits and sleeps. They never did need very many words.

The bald Elliot returns and this time, she doesn't laugh. She talks about old times with him. About bars she doesn't remember and detectives that may or may not have existed. She makes up the names when she can't quite put her finger on the correct one. Bald Elliot seems fooled, relieved. He still loves her. She can see it in his eyes when he kisses her forehead before leaving.

Her shrink visits daily. Or it feels like daily. The days all blend into each other in hospital. She starts to question what's in the pills they give her each day. But again, she doesn't get any answers.

She wants to go home but every time she asks they reply _tomorrow_, like she's an annoying child who won't be able to recall the previous day's promise. Instead, she's transferred to another ward with pale blue walls and a pin pad locking the double doors.

In the common room, she regales her fellow inmates with tales from her job, most of them true. She changes some names to protect the innocent, can't recall others. But she's worked a lot of cases over the years. She teaches some basic self-defence to two female patients and unwittingly starts a brawl. The women use their new skills on a couple of men they don't like the look of, one of them a nurse. The nurse loses a tooth and Olivia is banished to her room for the rest of the afternoon.

She keeps asking the doctors, nurses, head-shrinkers when she can get back to work. _Soon_, they all say. Or _when you're rested_. Or _just as soon as you're feeling better_. After the twenty-fifth-hundredth time she spreads her arms and insists, "I'm fine!". She sees the look in their eyes and knows that their next move is to grab a needle. Olivia backs off, lets the topic drop.

The Elliots keep coming, bringing things. Flowers. Magazines. Candles she can't burn. The younger Elliots' smell is familiar. Each time, they bring with them the smell of stale coffee and dusty cardboard and sickeningly sweet antiseptic. But the scent leaves when they do, taking with it its strange sense of comfort.

The blonde Elliot brings some people by. She brings an Alex. A Casey. And a Calvin. Olivia can't keep their names straight and starts to feel like a circus exhibit.

At night, the young Elliot fills her in on a case he's working. He's trying to track down someone named Stabler. He talked to a Richard Stabler. And a Bernadette Stabler. But apparently these are not the right Stablers. The one he needs has left town.

He stops and looks at her. Asks if she has any leads he should follow up on.

Olivia rolls her eyes and crosses her legs on the bed. "Jeez, El, you can't run a simple trace without me lookin' over your shoulder?"

He just shrugs, smiling slightly. "Guess I just miss your input."

He's not allowed to sleep on the locked ward, the nurses throw him out at nine, two hours after visiting time has officially ended. Elliot squeezes her hand, tells her to sleep well then leaves.

She dreams. But the dreams don't make sense. They're only snatches of reality. A room in a warehouse but no people in it. Or people, but no context anchoring them anywhere. She can't work out which body belongs in which room or which face belongs on which body. She can't pin anything in time or work out the sequence of what she sees. And before she can figure it out— she wakes up.

She wakes to a watercolor each day. Of a mountain. She hates it.

Her life is back-to-back infomercials and she hates them too. Though not as much as she hates the food. Always swallowed to disguise the bitter aftertaste of her pills.

She's been banned from telling interrogation stories. Or crime scene stories. Or autopsy stories. Or pretty much any kind of stories, since all her stories are pretty gruesome.

She lifts a pair of scissors from the nurses' station and cuts off her hair. What's left of it. One half of her head is already shaved, decorated by a neatly curved row of surgery stitches. The other half…she doesn't know how it got so long. She just got it snipped into a pixie cut the week before. Easier for the job, for those early morning catches. Also, shorter hair equals less harassment.

One suspect has a particular hard-on for her. Literally. He likes to press it into her butt. The last time he did, she took him out with an elbow to the nose. Broke it. Got sedated again.

She asks her shrink to tell them to quit sedating her. She's not a fucking mental patient. He talks to them and they don't sedate her. Until the next time. But the loser tried to put a cigarette out on her. She put it out on him instead. Then she got cross-examined about where she got the damn cigarettes. Olivia just folded her arms and demanded a lawyer.

The Alex creature returns, floating through her door in a haze of perfume and perfection. Her hair looks glorious. Olivia wants to cut it only a nurse took the scissors. When she can't resist telling her so, blurting it out in the middle of the other woman's sentence, Alex takes a small crocodile skin case out of her purse. Out of that, she takes a pair of nail scissors. She cuts a thick, gold inch off the bottom of her hair and gives her the loose strands.

Olivia hides them in her pillowcase.

Alex takes a breath, shifts a little closer on the bed. Then she tells her that they tracked down Stabler.

"Elliot must be relieved," she replies. "He's been working that case non-stop."

"Yeah," Alex nods. "He has."

Olivia mirrors her nod. She wants to ask for more hair. But she refrains. Might come off as crazy.

Casey comes and watches a baseball game with her. Olivia has no idea who she is or what is happening in the game. She just waits for the Elliots to return.

Sometimes, Bald Elliot brings her twizzlers.

One time, Young Elliot and Blonde Elliot come together. She spots them talking in the corridor beyond the locked doors. The way they look at each other, the way they stand close but don't touch – she's pretty sure they're sleeping together. She's been a detective for… a lot of years. She knows the signs.

She gets shooed away from the doors but when the Elliots enter her room, she smiles and tells them it's okay. She gets how it can be between partners. The intimacy. The dependency. The never-ending time. They tell her they aren't partners, that they are not—

"Save it," she says, smile dying. "I always knew you'd go back to her." She waves a hand at Blonde Elliot. "Gentlemen prefer blondes and all that…"

Elliot takes a step forward. "Liv—"

But Kathy stops him with a hand on his arm. "Nick. Leave it."

"Yeah. Leave." Olivia tucks her feet under the covers, turning her back to them and lying down. "I'm tired."

That night, Elliot doesn't stay with her. The nurses don't have to tell him to go long after all the other visitors have left.

The chair by her bed feels empty. And silent. And the walls begin to close in on her.

_TBC..._


	2. Chapter 2

Rating: T, adult themes, some language and implied violence

Warning: Character death

Disclaimer: Not mine, Dick Wolf's and those folks at NBC. Lyrics are by Kate Miller-Heidke

Spoilers: for season 15 & 16

Pairing(s): Elliot/Olivia. Some Olivia/Nick and minor Olivia/Alex undertones.

Summary: After Noah is abducted by a disciple of William Lewis', Olivia suffers a brain injury and psychotic break. Her friends work to locate Elliot in an effort to bring her back to reality.

A/N: I apologise for the delay in updating, I am usually much more prompt. I got caught up with Uni work though and couldn't spend time on fic. For this same reason, this story is two chapters long, not ten. That, and I did not wish to spend a lot of time in this reality. For the record, you will not find big dramatic breakthroughs in this story, as that is not how mental illness works in my experience. Neither will you find a full account of what happened to Olivia and Noah, just fragments to piece together, because I like to let readers do some of the work themselves.

As always, reviews are much appreciated.

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><p><em>And you hold me closer than I <em>

_Can ever remember being held,_

_And I am not afraid to sleep now_

_If we can stay like this until…_

**ii.**

She tries to keep track of the days, weeks, months by checking her chart. It hangs on the end of her bed, getting intermittently scrawled on in what looks like gibberish. Whenever she thinks she's got the date memorized though, she takes a nap or a pill and it seeps out of her head again. For this reason, and so many frightening others, Olivia tries to avoid sleep. But the little white capsules won't let her.

So the days continue to slip by. Eventually – she's not sure how long it takes, she has a vague sense of waiting – but eventually, Stabler shows up. They bring him to her which she supposes makes sense. Last time she checked she was still Commanding Officer of SVU. He's not cuffed so whatever he's done can't be too serious. He faces her, perched on the edge of her bed. It's where she conducts all her interviews now.

He asks her how she's feeling.

She asks him if he's been Mirandized.

When he looks confused, she tells him she speaks Dutch, Czech and a little Russian. So if he doesn't understand—

He interrupts, tells her that she speaks Spanish, Italian and French. But no Dutch or Czech or Russian.

She starts speaking in Spanish just to be sure.

He answers in Spanish. Halting, and with a shocking accent. She can tell what he's trying to say but suddenly she's the one who's confused.

"I'm sorry. What's your name again?"

"Stabler."

"What's that? Irish…?"

"Yep."

"I don't speak Irish."

"Neither do I. Plain old American English is fine."

She nods a few times. Then begins. "We're trying to find out about a little boy, Mr Stabler. We believe you might have some information on his whereabouts."

Stabler nods. Then says, "You mean Noah?"

"Yes." She reaches for her notepad and pen but can't find it. "Do you happen to have a last name for Noah?"

He casts a look at the two cops by the door. The blond skinny one and the solid black one are back. They just stone-face him. So Stabler shakes his head at her.

"How about an address?" she presses on, "Or next of kin?"

"Liv…"

She looks up, blinks. Then clicks her fingers at the black cop. "You. Gimme your pad."

He hands it to her with his pen then stares down at her a moment. She glares up at him until he backs off. Then she flicks through the pad, searching for a blank page. The writing looks like Thai to her. But she doesn't speak Thai. She speaks French and Spanish. And some Russian.

"So—" she looks up at Stabler, pad open, pen poised. "You were saying? About C.J.?"

Stabler just smiles sadly. "I'm afraid I can't help you."

She doesn't remember him leaving. Him or the cops. But they must've. She checks her chart, just to make sure. It says nothing about any visitors. The black cop let her keep his pen though, so Olivia makes a few notes. That way, she'll remember.

The following day, Mr Stabler returns without his escort, rioting at the nurses' station until they let him take her outside, beyond the locked doors.

_…I'll take full responsibility…!_ she hears him holler from her room, from her cross-legged position on her bed.

Olivia gets out of bed, puts on her slippers.

He takes her to a park. It's the first fresh air she's breathed in.…—

It's Fall and she had no idea. The leaves are brown and red and dead, crunching under their feet like brittle bones or shattered glass. They walk and walk and walk – she's spent enough time immobile in bed. He buys her food, actual food that's piping hot, not tepid and sludgy. She gravitates to a roadside cart where he buys her a hot dog topped with a little of everything. She can't actually remember how she likes her dog but she's so hungry she's willing to try it all. Stabler tries to tell her that she doesn't like hot mustard but she doesn't listen. What the hell would he know.

She chokes when she takes a bite, cheeks turning red. He pats her back and feeds her water. He was right, she mutters as she coughs and he pats. She does _not_ like hot mustard.

They walk a little longer and the wind picks up. Stabler buys them each a sweet, strong coffee. He also buys her chocolate, slipping it into her pocket for later.

She tells him she doesn't want to go back. She tells him that they sedate her and silence her. She tells him she can quote various infomercials verbatim. Then she starts quoting them, the words rolling rapidly off her tongue until he lifts a hand to halt her. She tells him how she wears slippers and a robe _all day_.

Stabler listens quietly then tells her they can stay out until sunset. They watch the sun set from a wooden bench and almost instantly the air turns cold. He lends her his coat. It's too big for her but it smells familiar in some deeply curious way.

Elliot is waiting for them at the hospital entrance. He's furious with Stabler, starts yelling that the hospital called him, that he checked her out without proper permission, that they were supposed to be back within the hour. Olivia puts a hand on his sleeve, tells him she's fine. She doesn't want Elliot losing his shit and punching Stabler, who seems like a decent enough guy.

Elliot shoots Stabler a dirty look as he guides her away, one hand resting on her back. Olivia looks over her shoulder, through the sliding glass doors at Stabler as she's lead away. In the elevator, her hand slips into her pocket, closing around the bar of chocolate.

That night, she washes her face, as she does every night. But every morning, the blood comes back and she has to wash it off again. Thick, sticky rivulets that ooze over her forehead, nose, cheeks and chin. It stains her skin, dries in the grooves of her wrinkles. And no matter how meticulously, how religiously she scours, it always comes back the next day, the next hour, the next moment.

Straightening at the sink and looking at her dripping face in the mirror, Olivia lifts the gun to her temple. She waits. Takes a breath. Holds it high in her chest. She stares down her reflection. Then squeezes the trigger. The chamber is empty. Every time. The gun never fires. Not the first time. Or the second. The third, fourth or fifth. Not even when she switches hands and presses the barrel against her other temple. She tells C.J. not to look – _look away, C.J., look away, baby_.

The instant the barrel makes contact with her skin, she realizes. It's not a gun. It's the hairbrush Elliot brought her. Her shaking hand uses it to brush her jagged hair. She dabs her chilled skin dry. Then she leaves the bathroom. Until the next day, when she once again performs her bloody morning ritual.

They're all gathered on her threshold again. They're all weighing into the debate over who should tell her. Her shrink, her neurologist, Elliot, Stabler – all of them want and don't want the responsibility. In the end, the shrink tells her. Stabler and Elliot sit either side of her on the bed. They seem disappointed by her response. She stares at the photo of the brown-haired boy for a moment.

_Noah_, she reminds herself internally, searching for the fragment of memory that might place him.

She turns to Stabler. "We need to notify the family." Then shakes her head. "God, I hate this part."

That night, Stabler takes Elliot's spot, sleeping in the rigid hospital chair with his feet propped up on her bed. When one nurse tries to eject him he growls _over my dead body_. She wakes from her fragmented dreams some time during the night. It's pitch black but she can tell he's not sleeping. She knows what his breath sounds like when he sleeps, it's buried in her mind somewhere, unable to be erased.

"Go home," she whispers in the dark.

He shifts in his chair, under his coat. "Hm?"

"Go home. Kathy will worry."

There's a pause. Then he says:

"Kathy and I divorced."

"Oh that's right," she muses, taking a breath and releasing it. "That's right, I remember…"

His chair creaks. "…You what?"

She's half-asleep as she replies in an irritated grumble, "I said I _remember.._."

It comes back to her incrementally, in inescapable dreams, in disturbed daytime fragments. Her shrink says she may never fully recover the memory of the incident itself. He says her mind is protecting her from the trauma. If so, then she never wants it to stop.

Her days begin to fall into a rhythm. Therapy with Dr Lindstrom in the mornings. Walks in the park with Elliot in the afternoons. They don't talk much. She's generally talked out after therapy. And sometimes she still misplaces words. Or mixes up names. Or stops mid-sentence without knowing why, without being able to continue. It happens more often in the afternoon, when she's tired, when her mind is allowed to wander.

When it does happen, Elliot brings her back by covering her hand with his and whispering a quiet, "Liv…"

In the evenings, after Elliot leaves, she writes. Her nemesis nurse confiscated the pen Fin gave her after she scrawled all over her chart with it. Now, Olivia asks for it back. She asks for paper too so Dr Lindstrom brings her a chunky, lined pad of white paper. Her brain is predictably rusty, her hand stiff, unaccustomed to the routine activity. But Lindstrom encourages her to persist.

At first, she just writes down words, names, phrases. Whatever's familiar. She records whatever memories return to her. She tries to describe faces, places, smells. Sometimes the past seems like nothing more than a beckoning, threatening black pool waiting and wanting to drown her. On those days, she simply records things she wants to remember from the present. Like Alex's hair. Or Elliot's eyes. Nick's hands. Amanda's strength. Casey's kindness. Calvin's youthful bravery and constancy. The way his thin arms tentatively enfold her.

After John Munch visits her, she writes down the best of his quips.

With her former captain, it's his discreet understanding that she tries to put into words.

As she writes, she gnaws on the sugary red twizzlers he brings her, lets them hang from the corner of her mouth. And she hears her mother's voice scold her, telling her she'll spoil her teeth with cavities. Olivia writes that down too. The last thing she wants is to misplace those memories as well. So she writes down anything she can remember about her mother. From the type of perfume she wore to her preferred brand of scotch to her favorite French poet. Writing out her mother's favorite poem in faltering French, she finds it's all still there. Her lips test out a smile.

When it comes to Noah, she's a virtual blank. There's a soft, sweet, after-bath baby smell that she can't quite put to paper. A blanket he loved. Pudgy arms and legs. But trying to write about him, all she comes up with is a full page of:

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah _

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah _

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah _

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah _

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah _

_NoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoahNoah_

_NoahNoahNoahNoah _

The last few lines are blotted with tears. The moisture makes the black ink bleed.

One afternoon, during her lazy afternoon stroll with Elliot, she sees a little boy. He's sitting on a picnic blanket with his mother, a set of plastic keys shoved in his mouth. He has brown hair and wears blue stripes. She starts to cry and can't stop. Tears seem too simple, too easy, an insufficient expression of her sorrow. But they don't stop falling for three full days.

They don't sedate her, not anymore. They've found the right drug regimen for her and the doctors are pleased with her progress. They release her under the proviso that she remains well supported and supervised. In the car, Nick and Elliot argue about who will sleep on her couch and keep watch. In the back seat, Olivia leans her head against the lowered window and sucks in the air of the city – the exhaust fumes and the garbage odour and the passing scent of clashing cuisines. In the front seat, Elliot – claiming seniority – wins.

Someone's already cleared away Noah's things. Except for a box stashed discreetly in her wardrobe, her apartment shows no signs of ever harboring a baby boy with no family in the world but her. Olivia stares at the box but doesn't open it. She just hangs up her coat and closes the closet door. Her bet is on Rollins as the invisible grief fairy.

On the morning of the memorial service, Elliot makes her coffee. He drives her. Holds her hand when her feet stall on the threshold. He waits as she just stands there, eyes unblinking and hand gripping his. Something inside her spirals downwards but never hits hell. Elliot tells her to breathe and eventually they enter, taking a seat in the front pew.

She's written something but when it comes time, she can't say it aloud. Her throat is painfully tight, her temples beat with the rhythm of her blood and the swell of tears is too close to erupting. She gives the folded and re-folded piece of paper to Elliot and he speaks for her. Nick takes custody of her hand, gripping good and tight.

Behind them sits Amanda Rollins, Fin Tutuola, Donald Cragen, John Munch, Sonny Carisi, Brian Cassidy, Alexandra Cabot, Casey Novak, Bayard Ellis, Rafael Barba, Melinda Warner, George Huang and others. Her family has come out in force to support her. And to do what they do best. Honor a life that barely had a chance to begin.

When each of her friends kisses her cheek or shakes her hand or pulls her in for a hug, she remembers their names without too much hesitation. Carisi is the only one she completely blanks on. He good-naturedly fills her in. Then he places a bunch of white flowers at the foot of the easel that holds Noah's photograph. The flowers and tributes will be transported to Noah's gravesite later that day.

Back at her apartment, all she wants is a drink. She almost goes to the cabinet to pour one before remembering that all that has been cleared out too. Disappeared, just like the evidence of her short-term son. She can't drink on her medication. So that…is that. She's got no wine, no spirits, not even a lone bottle of beer. She's got no job to go to, no case to immerse herself in. And no child to take care of.

Her only appointment is with Noah's grave. All that's left to do now is mourn. Mourn and mourn and mourn until she's mourned enough to move on. Until she's mourned enough that opening her eyes in the morning doesn't make her bones ache.

Olivia sheds her coat, scarf, shoes, earrings. Then she sits on the couch, hands still in her lap. Elliot sits next to her. He puts an arm around her, draws her close, holds her tight. He kisses her temple when she starts to cry.

"I could just…" she says and feels him nod.

"Go ahead," he murmurs, one hand stroking her shoulder through her black blouse.

She looks up at him, feels the history in her voice, in her eyes as she whispers, "El…"

That night, all the pieces fall into place in her dreams. She sees the warehouse chamber with three people in it – her, Noah and Lewis' disciple. She sees the disciple's face attached to his body. She sees his gun, his instruments of torture. There's grit on Noah's chubby cheek and when he cries for her, she can see that one baby tooth poking through his pink gums. His cries annoy the disciple. She can see him losing his cool. She creeps closer, broken glass squelching under her shoes. The disciple tells her he'll shoot her if she takes another step.

Then he turns to Noah—

She wakes with a blood-halting scream and his name trapped in her throat. Elliot is there in an instant. He brings her a glass of water. He mops her hot forehead with a cool cloth. He finds a fresh t-shirt to replace the one she sweated through and he dresses her like a small child, threading her limp arms through each sleeve. When her breath has returned to normal, when she can stand to be alone, he goes to fix her tea.

He returns to the bed with a hot mug, hands it to her without a word. He cracks the blinds then joins her in the bed. They sit in silence, slumped spines in wrinkled t-shirts propped against the sturdy headboard. Together they watch red-gold strips of light spread slowly across her blank wall as outside a new sun rises.

Today they will visit the grave of her son.

When she weeps, stalls or disintegrates, Elliot will be there. When she looks for him, those blue eyes will meet hers with a depth of understanding that no one else could possibly proffer. And when Olivia's empty hand reaches out, her partner's large, warm hand will reach back, anchoring and enfolding. Giving her something to hold onto in a world disfigured by despair.

_END._


End file.
